Some training stuff! (Consistency, base miles, close setback!, weight)

Hey!

I just completed my 8th base week. To be honest, it is the most that I have ever completed straight without skipping a planned day. 

Actually there was one day I had to skip but it was due to family obligations. Luckily, it was the day of a 1-hour recovery workout...so it was a little easier on the mentality (err...ego) to let it slide. However, that wasn't without consequence!

What I did was purely a rookie and a self-coached athlete's typical decision-mistake. I added that single hour onto a 1.5hour aerobic ride--zone 2. Obviously, it doesn't seem like it would hurt but what I didn't realize was that the following workouts would suffer from that extra hour of zone 2. In other words, it would've been fine if it weren't for the way I scheduled the following workouts.

After that 2.5 hour ride...which was really supposed to be a 1.5 hour ride to keep the aerobic muscles active I did sprints, another 2hr aerobic ride, some threshold intervals in a 2.5hr time frame, a 1.5 recovery spin, and a 3.5hr aerobic ride. As you can see, I had almost no recovery and if you added everything up including the 2.5hr preceding all of the above, that would add up to 6 straight days of workouts worth 13 hours of about 85% moderate intensity.

I was actually already feeling the soreness and fatigue during the 2hr ride and the ride with ME intervals. Needless to say, I don't think my intervals were effective so I can't increase the workload when it comes to that workout next time. 

Anyways, I thought I'd be exhausted and lose fitness, but after taking Saturday off (which was scheduled and not spontaneous), my ride today (Sunday) felt much better especially toward the end, so I'm going to ride easy again tomorrow and hope that I can tackle old la honda, stage road, and Tunitas creek fresh on Tuesday on the team ride with SFSU triathlon and cycling.

Consistency

I'm really happy because I'm going into my final base mile week! I just love how my training plan coincided so well with my daily life...kind of. For instance, I didn't plan around the fact that I'd be doing the SBM hill climb, but a recovery week just happened to land on that week of Jan 1! Thus, I was quite fresh! I'm also on the last week of base miles AND the last week of my winter break which means next week will be the first week of school...which is quite hectic and does mess up my training schedule a bit, however it just so happens another recovery week lands on the week I need it a lot! Very cool.

With all that said, I'm entering the 9th week of my training season and I've been very consistent in terms of keeping myself on track with workouts and logging my miles and doing daily reflections! I'm hoping I can stay consistent when school comes around, but I shouldn't have to much trouble considering my school schedule allows plenty of time for training. 

Weight

I'm also getting the weight loss benefit of base miles...kind of. I weigh myself everyday 2-3 times. If I ride that day, I weigh myself after the ride and the other two times is after I wake up and after I eat dinner. Obviously, the post-dinner weight contains a lot of dead weight but I think it keeps me honest because at the end of the week my total weight is usually divided by 18-20 values to get the average so I think the data is well rounded and very well represents my body mass progress.

Anyways, along with training consistently I have also seen a consistent trend in my weight. It seems to be dropping on average at least 0.3-0.4 pounds a week. 8 weeks ago I was at 132.something and to-date my average has continued to fall now to 129.5 which is almost a 3-pound loss!

I don't really have much to lose but I think I can lose some fat and make it to 126 but I think I will focus on training this year and skip the detailed diet part until next year or if it really starts to make an impact on my performance.

The reason I'm being passive with my weight revolves around my PR at San Bruno. I raced that at 129-130 pounds but when I did it the other three years I was probably 118, 123, and 125 respectively and all got 18:30ish. So I definitely gained power but 16:43 yields a 10% increase in power to weight and I'm happy at that, so I don't want to lose focus on training because dieting requires a different mentality and lifestyle that also needs to be carefully planned and uhh executed.

Well I guess that's all I have for now!

Until the next rant,

- DB

“It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives. It's what we do consistently."

--- Anthony Robbins

"It never gets easier, you just get faster."

Today I experienced this quote when I was doing my leg opener ride for tomorrow's race. I usually use Southgate Avenue as my leg opener segment. Two years ago I got my first Strava KOM on there, with a time of 5:19. So you could say it has some value to me.

I kept the KOM time until January 27 of this year, where I improved it by 11 seconds, with a time of 5:08. My goal was to get a sub-5-minute climb. But in March, during my leg opener for the UC Berkeley Race weekend, I was riding with Eric and attacked and practically time trialed/sprinted the flat section. Surprisingly, I found I had yet again improved my time by another 11 seconds, getting 4:57.

Then my first KOM ever gets taken away from me about a week later. The new KOM time was 4:45, something I wasn't too sure I could beat. So yesterday, knowing I would open my legs up on Southgate Avenue for Wente Vineyards, I compared my speed on certain sections of the 1-mile climb. In order to PR yet again, I'd have to climb fast on the graded part, and sprint fast on the flatter part.

So that's exactly what I did today, I cruised up the hill at tempo--close but not quite at LTHR, and then attacked where I attacked Eric, and then sprinted the flat section.

I felt like crap after, and was disappointed in myself because I couldn't spin as fast as I wanted to on the flat section. It was already painful to breath which is why I couldn't push myself anymore. Plus I'm about 4-weeks detrained.

So I continued riding easy until I got home, worried that my performance on Southgate would indicate poor performance at tomorrow's road race.

I got home and uploaded the Strava file, see the icon of the trophy with a (x1) next to it, scroll down and notice the KOM crown! I look further right and see my new PR of 4:12--a 45 second improvement from last time, and a 1:07 improvement from the first time I ever went hard up the climb.

Which is why they say that it never gets easier, we only get faster :)